Massive Internet Outage in California No Accident Say Authorities   - 1,290 Views,

The impacted Internet and telecommunications providers, including AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless, scrambled to determine the cause of the outages, which were first reported in the wee hours of the morning on Thursday.

The first four cuts happened just before 1:30 a.m. local time, severing four AT&T cables; the fifth occurred a couple of hours later and took out a Sprint cable.

As the extent of the outage became apparent, the county of Santa Clara called a local state of emergency.

More than 52,000 land lines were out, along with the cellular service for countless wireless customers of Verizon, AT&T, Nextel and Sprint.

Said Police Sgt. Jim Gillio of the town of Gilroy, “We’ve never to this extent in recent history had this kind of phone outage.”

Police currently have no leads on the perpetrators, who had to open a heavy manhole cover and climb down approximately 8 to 10 feet into the manhole to cut the fiber.

Some have suggested that the Communications Workers of America union, whose contract with AT&T expired last week, may be behind the outage, a charge which was vehemently denied by a CWA spokesperson.

“Absolutely not. Our members are not involved in this,” said CWA spokeswoman Candice Johnson. “That would be counterproductive. We are on the job. So it doesn’t make any sense. Our goal is to get a quality, fair contract and that is our focus right now,” she added.

Service is slowly being restored as crews worked throughout the day and into the night to remedy the situation. Full service is not expected to be restored until around midnight local time or a later, meaning that the immediate impact of the act was to effectively knock out communications to a substantial sector of Silicon Valley and surrounds for a full 24 hours.